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Before there was the mining of bitcoins, there was BOINC. Where your spare computing cycles helped cure cancer, find aliens, solve mathematical proofs. And the
by gausswho 3y ago
Before there was the mining of bitcoins, there was BOINC. Where your spare computing cycles helped cure cancer, find aliens, solve mathematical proofs.
And then self-interest trumped altruism.
- s0rce 3y agoI've commented this previously but I think the major impact to these applications was that CPUs more effectively idle themselves and reduce the fan speeds. Previously there was no noticeable impact with the PC running 100% all the time. Now the fan will go crazy compared to sitting idle. Not to mention there are computers that basically can't run 100% without some sort of duty cycle to cool back down and they will thermally throttle.
- ac29 3y agoYou can use runtime power limits to put yourself pretty much anywhere on the performance-efficiency curve you want, within thermal limits. Reducing the power limit will reduce heat/fan noise and can improve perf/watt. On Linux, see: https://github.com/powercap/powercap https://github.com/powercap/powercap